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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

There's no need to worry about porn sites. One of the amendments proposed yesterday was to instruct the AG to not use any resources protecting the copyrights of pornography producers. I suppose their legal rights aren't as important as the industries that backed this bill.

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I missed that, so thanks for highlighting that one. And that's pretty interesting, because I'd imagine that pornography producers are amongst those whose IP is most often stolen. But you're right: according to Forbes, "The [Porn / Adult Entertainment] industry is tiny next to broadcast television ($32.3 billion in 1999 revenue, according to Veronis Suhler), cable television ($45.5 billion), the newspaper business ($27.5 billion), Hollywood ($31 billion), even to professional and educational publishing ($14.8 billion)." http://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html

The porn industry has grown a lot since 2001. The rationale given for the amendment was that without it, the AG would spend all its time working pornography cases, as they'd be the majority of copyright infringement occurring.

"Most of the copyright abuse is happening in this area... so let's ignore it in favour of the concerns of a larger group of patrons."

Fantastic.

How did they justify it, though? Did they explicitly say that "our industry is more important"?

They just asserted that the government should not be working towards helping pornography producers because the material is distasteful.

At the same time that amendment didn't pass (just to be clear). It was basically a tactic by the anti-SOPA contingent to blur the lines of legality...the pitch was "Why waste taxpayer dollars enforcing pornographic copyright? Vote for this!". I'm don't think it was raised was really a reflection of the lack of desire of the AG to enforce porn copyright...I'd guess not based on the context of it as a defensive, anti-SOPA move.

edit: it was raised by Jared Polis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Polis - who is in the anti-SOPA camp.

> "I suppose their legal rights aren't as important as the industries that backed this bill."

As if SOPA needed to look any worse, now it has the appearance of being a protection racket for the extortion of contributions.

I wonder if that may not turn out to be a flaw/attack vector in SOPA: their attorneys may be able to argue selective enforcement.

Did they reintroduce it? I saw it shot down around 5PMish EST, and rightly so, I suppose, if you believe in SOPA.

Who decides what's porn?

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